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Wildlands & Woodlands

Harvard Forest still needs to raise $50,000 to cover costs associated with protecting the Ernie Gould woodlot with a conservation easement and then purchasing the property. Harvard Forest does not receive financial support from Harvard University for this type of project.

The 2008 Update has been released. In this issue, it describes momentum with a diverse constituency which has banded together in the Wildlands and Woodlands Partnership to promote the larger W & W vision. This group has encouraged the formation of regional partnerships focused on land protection and forest stewardship, promoted new policy initiatives to fund broad scale land protection and has worked with a large group of landowners in western Massachusetts to develop a regional forest protection effort.

David Foster, Director of Harvard Forest, received the 2006 New England Wild Flower Society Massachusetts State Conservation Award. He was honored for guiding the development of Harvard Forest from a small academic outpost to a major research site and for changing the way biologists interpret landscape patterns and ecological processes. The award emphasized Dr.

Harvard Forest's Wildlands and Woodlands proposal to conserve roughly half of Massachusetts as protected lands has received a boost from a new report detailing seven strategies to finance the ambitious proposal. The new report is the product of a recent Wildlands and Woodlands Conservation Finance Roundtable.

Some eight months after the report's release four major and complementary efforts have arisen to support this conservation vision, sustain its dissemination and promote its initial implementation. These include:

James Levitt (director of Program on Conservation Innovation at Harvard Forest) and Kathy Lambert (president of Ecologic) received a grant to host a roundtable of national leaders in the area of conservation finance in Spring 2006. The goal is to indentify potential mechanisms for funding an ambitious regional land protection effort like Wildlands and Woodlands.

Since the release of the scientific report "Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts" calling for a bold new land protection effort to stave-off accelerating forest fragmentation in Massachusetts, many organizations and persons from the private forester to the public servant have expressed interest and/or endorsement of the vision. Below are some examples of efforts already underway:

In a new scientific report entitled "Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts", Dr. David Foster the Director of Harvard Forest and his colleagues from the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University call for a bold new land protection effort to stave-off accelerating forest fragmentation in Massachusetts.